As Millions Of Consumers Unwrapped Kindle Fires Over Christmas, Mobile Ad Impressions Spiked 261 Percent

In November, Mobile ad network Millennial Media reported that Amazon’s new tablet devices Kindle Fire, was seeing ad impressions grow at an average daily rate of 19% since its launch to the public in the middle of the month. Millennial says it’s not just seeing millions of impressions and the device is on a monthly run rate of hundreds of millions of impressions. But that data was gathered from a few weeks of usage from consumers in November, and as Amazon reported yesterday, December’s holiday season brought record sales for the Kindle Fire, with over 4 million Kindle devices sold in December. The Kindle Fire was the most gifted and wished for product on Amazon this season.

Today, Millennial is releasing data from its ad network showing impressive growth numbers from the Kindle Fire over the holiday weekend. In November, impressions on the Kindle Fire grew an average rate of 19 percent every day. Over this past weekend, Millennial says that as consumers opened and used their new Kindle Fires, ad impressions increased even more. As millions of consumers unwrapped new Kindle Fires, Millennial saw an average daily growth rate of 113 percent.

On December 24, impressions grew 32 percent; and on Christmas day in particular, impressions on the Kindle Fire grew 261 percent. The day after Christmas saw a 46 percent jump in ad impressions.



Of course, the Kindle Fire wasn’t the only tablet that saw a spike from the holidays. From December 23 to 26, the iPad had a daily growth rate of 6 percent. The iPad remained the leading tablet overall on Millennial’s platform during this time period, although the massive gain from the Kindle Fire helped to significantly close the gap.

The Kindle Fire’s impression growth on the platform has slightly outpaced that of the iPad when the iPad launched in early 2010. Millennial says that though the Kindle Fire has been introduced into a more mature tablet market than the market which greeted the original iPad, Amazon’s entertainment-focused platform and the lower price point have helped drive this early use by consumers.

Now that the holiday gifting season if over, it should be interesting to see if consumer usage of the Kindle Fire continues to grow at such a rapid pace. For example, the release of a new version of the iPad could effect Kindle Fire growth in 2012.

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Today Amazon Will Give You $15 To Use PriceCheck and Screw Local Retailers -

Today, December 10th, Amazon is offering avery special deal you’re going to love and your local brick-and-mortar retailer is going to hate. Use its PriceCheck mobile app and get 5% off your purchase, up to $5 at a time, as many as 3 times. Why the discounts to use PriceCheck? The app is designed to get you to visit local shops, try out a product, submit valuable pricing data to Amazon, leave without buying anything, and make your purchase on Amazon instead.

Actually scanning an in-store item isn’t technically required to get the discount, though Amazon doesn’t make this clear at first. The webpage for the deal states “Get a 5% discount just by checking a price”, but you can check a price by typing in a product’s name from home without submitting a local price. If you read the terms it says “In-store price submission and location confirmation are optional.”

Amazon explains the local pricing data helps it offer competitive prices. That’s exactly right. Because it offers such a wide range of products and makes the real money from hooking users on its shopping experience, Amazon can afford to lower its prices to beat out brick-and-mortars. PriceCheck helps it identify which products it needs to put on sale, and the one-day discount will get shoppers used to looking on Amazon for these deals.

Now, I’m no luddite. Efficient technology’s march over old models is natural and inevitable. But using shoppers to gather reconnaissance on its offline enemies is pretty aggressive. It also promotes show-rooming where users get the benefit of checking out a product in person, but then neglect the shops that pay overhead to offer that service.

There’s little that brick-and-mortar stores can do to stop this. If they berate people for scanning their products with PriceCheck, they’ll just push them right into Amazon’s clutches. Shoppers will have to decide whether to take the discount, or support their local mom-and-pop or even their local Walmart which at least keeps jobs nearby. But in this economy, most people’s allegiance is to their wallet.

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Watch Out Amazon - Google Looking to Venture into Delivery Services

After watching Amazon corner the online retail market, Google is in talks with merchants to begin a delivery service that would allow users to order items online from local stores and receive them within a day. But does it make sense for Google to directly take on the online retail giant?

For years, Amazon has been the online retailer of choice for most buyers. And lately, it’s become even more popular. Amazon’s relatively new Prime membership program now allows shoppers two-day delivery on anything for a $79 annual fee, and so far it’s been very popular. According to The Wall Street Journal, Prime led a 42% increase in the company’s sales in the first nine months of the year.

The problem for Google is that when shoppers buy items online, many people search directly inside Amazon, bypassing Google completely. According to comScore, Amazon sees about three to four times the number of product-related searches that Google does. Now, Google wants in on the action.
According to the WSJ, Google is in talks with Gap, OfficeMax and Macy’s to begin a delivery system in which users could search and order items, for a fee, that would get delivered within a day or two. The search engine wouldn’t be selling items directly to consumers, but it would act as a middle man between a shopper and a local seller. According to the report, Google is hoping to launch the program next year.

The move follows a number of other retail-related ventures for the search engine, including Google Wallet, which allows users to make payments with a mobile phone, and Google Offers, which is its daily deals branch. It’s unclear whether Google would take a cut of the sales, but it would certainly allow Google to grab advertising revenue elsewhere as it drives more people to shop through its search engine.

According to The New York Times and media research firm BIA/Kelsey, local advertising is already a large part of Google’s business. Local search ad revenue is around $6 billion annually and is expected to grow.

But taking on Amazon is a tall order. It’s been around for close to two decades now and has firmly supplanted itself as the default retailer of choice online. But as Google continues to find new ways to offer services to its users and generate revenue, the two online giants will only keep bumping heads.

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Amazon Brings Comparison Shopping App - Price Check To Android Phones

During last year’s holiday shopping season, Amazon released Price Check for the iPhone, a comparison shopping app which allows users can scan the barcode of a product, take a picture of an item or say the product’s name to access product listings on Amazon.com’s marketplace. Today, the e-commerce giant is launching the app on Android phones.

Shoppers use the Price Check app to scan a barcode, snap a picture, or say or type a product name to see prices from Amazon.com’s marketplace and its 2 million online merchants. One exclusive feature to the Android app is the ability to scan in either portrait or landscape mode. The app will display prices sorted from lowest to highest and will also show if the item is available for free shipping.

Users can read product reviews, add the item to a wishlist, share the item and decide whether the Amazon offering is a better deal than the store offering. Shoppers can then purchase the item with 1-Click shopping. Amazon says Price Check includes prices on ‘millions of products’, from books to HDTVs to blenders to baby strollers.

Amazon says that so far this year, shoppers with iPhones choose Price Check’s barcode scanner to check prices more than any other search method available with the Price Check app and use Price Check ‘millions of times’, most frequently on weekends.

The app is similar to eBay’s RedLaser scanning app, which includes similar functionality and the ability to buy items directly from eBay. Amazon also recently released Flow, which uses augmented reality to help users explore and discover tens of millions of products in a real world setting, including books, DVDs, packaged electronics and toys.

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